Susan H. Rodger Biography

Susan H. Rodger is a Professor of the Practice in the Computer Science
Department at Duke University. She was previously an Assistant Professor in
the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from
1989 to 1994. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Purdue
University in 1989. Prof. Rodger works in the areas of visualization and
interaction, and computer science education. The main projects she has
major contributions in are visualization and interaction software for
education in theoretical computer science, computing in K-12 and peer-led
team learning.

Prof. Rodger received the 2013 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator
Award in 2014, the ACM Distinguished Educator award in 2006 and she
was one of two finalist candidates for the NEEDS Premier Award for
Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware for the software JFLAP
(mentioned below). Rodger has written one book and over forty journal and
conference publications. Rodger's research has been supported by eleven
National Science Foundation grants totaling over 6 million, seven IBM
Faculty Awards, and other funding from IBM, Google, Coursera, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard
for a total funding of approximately 10 million. Rodger is currently
on the ACM SIGCSE Board as past immediate chair, a board member of CRA-W, and a
member of the ACM Education Policy Committee. She was the chair of the AP
Computer Science Development Committee from 1997-2000 and a member of the
AP Computer Science Development Committee from 1995-2001. She has been
a SIGCSE Board member since 2010 as Secretary (2010-2013), Board Chair
(2013-2016) and Immediate Past Chair (2016-2019).
She has also been involved with the SIGCSE Symposium in many ways including co-Chair for
SIGCSE 2008, Program co-chair for SIGCSE 2007, Panels and Special Sessions
Chair for SIGCSE 2005, and Supporter/Exhibitor Liason from 2008 to 2014.
She has
organized four Alice Symposiums and over fifty workshops on Alice, JFLAP,
Peer-led Team learning, career mentoring for faculty, and other computer
science education topics. She has supervised over eighty-five undergraduates and
fifteen masters students in research projects, and co-advised one
Ph.D. student.

Visual and Interactive Software for Computer Science

Prof. Rodger has developed JFLAP, software for experimenting
with formal languages and automata, for more than twenty-five years with
forty-five
students.
Prof. Rodger started developing software tools for the area of formal
languages
and automata in 1991. The first tool developed was NPDA, then expanding into FLAP
(Formal
Languages and Automata Package) with Finite State Machines, NPDA and Turing
Machines. Many related tools were developed along the way such as
JeLLRap, LLparse, PumpLemma, and Pate. In 1996, the FLAP software was converted to Java and renamed
JFLAP.

With JFLAP one can build and experiment with several types of automata (finite state machine,
pushdown
automata, multi-tape Turing machine, Moore and Mealy machines), regular
expressions and several types of grammars (regular, context-free, and
unrestricted). One can experiment with proofs such as NFA to DFA, DFA
to minimal state DFA, NPDA to CFG, CFG to NPDA, etc. One can experiment
with parsing algorithms including brute-force, LL(1), SLR(1), and CYK.
Additionally, one can experiment with L-systems and pumping lemmas for both
regular and context-free languages.

Rodger has also done work in algorithm animation, creating the
scripting language JAWAA to easily create animations over the
web. With JAWAA one can animate both primitive shapes and data
structures such as arrays, lists, stacks and queues.

Integrating Computing into K-12

Prof. Rodger is a leader in integrating computing into K-12 using the Alice
3-D virtual worlds programming environment.
The Adventures in Alice
Programming project has been
supported by National Science Foundation ITEST and ITEST Scale-up grants totaling 3.8
million dollars with additional support from IBM.
She has run three Alice Symposiums and over twenty-five Alice
Workshops, with the largest
Symposium having over 120 attendees. She has taught Alice in one-week
to three-week workshops to over 400
K-12 teachers at Duke.
She has developed free
curriculum
materials targetted to middle school and high school students
that include over 120
curriculum materials including tutorials on programming and animation
topics and challenge worlds to complete. At her two-week or
longer
workshops,
K-12 teachers have developed over 300 lesson
plans
that include a sample Alice
world that are also available for free. Teachers attending the
workshops are in a wide range of disciplines including mathematics,
science, language arts, history, music, art, foreign language,
english as second language, business
technology, computer applications and physical education.
She has supervised over 30 undergraduate student projects on Alice
and integrating computing into K-12 disciplines.

Peer-led Team Learning in Computer Science

Prof. Rodger is a leader in integrating peer-led team learning (PLTL) into
computer science and was part of a collaborative effort with seven other
universities that
resulted in the
pltlcs.org website, curriculum materials on PLTL CS, and four
workshops on PLTL including one two-day workshop held at Duke
University in 2007 with 73 participants.
This project was supported by an NSF
ITWF grant.